The time has come to upgrade. Unfortunately I don't play much computer games anymore, apparently becoming an architect/construction manager takes all of my time. But I do want my computer to run them, and mine is like 5 years old now. Cbf building it like my old one, but I found this one prebuilt:

Thanks Deman! Yeah there's no rush, been looking into building my own too, the price differences etc. I think I'll have to build it to get a perfect system though I was thinking of http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/NVID ... OP2DI1GD5/ for a GPU, not too expensive and seems good in terms of cost effectiveness. Might go a cheaper CPU to compensate, my budget is ~$1200 so can't have it all. But I remember when I built my last PC, that my GPU should have cost like 30% of my unit, oh how the times have changed!

Using a 24" atm Kash, have a 32" TV that I play movies/TV shows on though as a second monitor, and might be upgrading to 27" monitor soon. I'm using a Q6600 atm so I'm sure an i5 will be a huge upgrade :p

Probably wouldn't bother overclocking it to be honest, last time I OC'd a piece of hardware it died a couple of months later Reckon I should just go for the i7 if I'm not gonna OC? the i7 2600 is $289, or $308 for the 2600K. Also, what is this K business? Didn't have these last time I built my PC from memory!

simonsmp wrote: Also, what is this K business? Didn't have these last time I built my PC from memory!

K just means it can be overclocked.

edit: The sandy bridge reviews are in and while theres small performance increases most of the improvement is in the integrated graphics (which no serious gamer will use) and power savings (which you dont care about on a desktop). So if these new chips allow some price drops on the old ones Id grab an old one.

So does the K come with better stock cooling or something? That's a really interesting article. Reading more, this shows the 2700k at 3.5GHz being pretty competitive to those more expensive chips in benchmarks, and here shows how close 2550K is in gaming too. The place I'm buying my parts at doesn't seem to have an i5 2550K though, I'd suppose a 2500K would be close enough.

simonsmp wrote:So does the K come with better stock cooling or something? That's a really interesting article. Reading more, this shows the 2700k at 3.5GHz being pretty competitive to those more expensive chips in benchmarks, and here shows how close 2550K is in gaming too. The place I'm buying my parts at doesn't seem to have an i5 2550K though, I'd suppose a 2500K would be close enough.

2500k would be close enough. the K just means you have the option to overclock as far as you want, not that the coolers better. You can go pretty well with the stock cooler tho. With no K your limited to intels Turbo boost (you'll have to google that).

Youd be better off putting the money on the gfx card than a top top of the line CPU

Quick question on hard drives... I'm noticing that 6gb/s is beyond my current hard drives and my mobo supports it. So I was thinking of buying a WD 1TB caviar black 6gb/s 7200RPM, BUT, can I transfer windows from one hard drive to the other...? If so, how? Also, would it actually improve my system performance over my current 3gb/s in terms of general use more so than file transfer? If not, probably won't waste my money. Or should I get a SSD if I want to dramatically improve performance? Couldn't find any useful comparisons on google I just want a PC that runs hell fast! Don't want any hard drives holding me back. Going to buy this bad boy on Thursday, the computer store I go to doesn't have the 2500K anymore, so getting the 3570K yay.

edit: Found this to help with transferring windows installation, but still coudln't find anything to say if it was worth buying a new drive to increase performance

edit2: After watching this, I'm sold on a SSD. Only using 90GB on my C:\ atm, so 128GB SSD will be heaps. Any suggestions on SSD types? I'm thinking the OCZ 128GB Petrol, for sata III etc. Any differing thoughts?